Letter of Recommendation: Bogs

Often associated with murk and evil spirits, bogs are actually quite vibrant — a whole ecosystem laid bare.Credit...Katrina Kepule for The New York Times

By Henry Wismayer

Nov. 16, 2016

Bogs, never the most cherished of landscapes, got a particularly bad rap when I was growing up in the 1980s. There were the fantasy films, of course — perhaps you remember the “Bog of Eternal Stench” from “Labyrinth,” one of many obstacles standing between a young Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie’s Goblin King. But my youthful preconceptions were perhaps shaped more by Boglins, a series of grotesque rubbery puppets released by Mattel. Mine was named Dwork, a slime-green monstrosity with hooded eyes, and for years thereafter it remained my physical reference point for bogs, a land type whose very name, with its double plosive, became a byword in my mind for murk and monsters.

Away from pop culture, the reality of bogs might seem no less unpleasant. This is, I suspect, because they are often confused with swamps, which are similarly dank but thickly forested. Bogs are generally more open, characterized by an abundance of sphagnum, a superabsorbent moss, and the accretion of peat. They cover around 3 percent of the earth’s land surface, but most of them are found in the bleak northern latitudes to which few of us venture. This remoteness, as much as their frequent conflation with swamps, has served to traduce bogs in the popular imagination. Even their mode of creation — of plant matter decaying into crepuscular peat — seems to connote darkness and hostility to life.

To the extent I gave it any thought, my own antipathy lasted until I encountered a bog for the first time. My corrective was Soomaa, literally a “land of bogs,” set amid the nondescript farmlands of southwest Estonia. A national park since 1993, it’s a tranquil region patched with pine forest, where beavers swim in lazy streams and mushrooms proliferate along bosky walking trails. It is also, famously, smeared with some of the largest bogs in Europe. And it was here, one day last summer, that I found myself wrestling a pair of red snowshoes over my walking boots and teetering on the northern rim of the Kuresoo, a giant, putrefying sponge almost twice the size of Manhattan.

There to guide me on a traverse of the Kuresoo was Aivar Ruukel, a local expert, redoubtable in camo fatigues and a knee-length poncho. “People are always surprised when they see how beautiful it is,” he said, beckoning me onto the sphagnum, though at this point, presented with a forbidding terrain of mist and stunted trees, I still needed some convincing.

Bogs have always been forbidding places, rich in sinister folklore. In Soomaa and elsewhere, myths of will-o’-the-wisp, a diabolical spectral light that leads men to soggy deaths, overlap with true horror stories of people and livestock gone astray, never to be found. Only a fool would approach a bog without due caution. And yet, three hours later, I was halfway across the Kuresoo experiencing a kind of joy.

As I adjusted to the sensation of the gelatinous surface under my boots, I began to think of bogs in a completely new way. Far from being cruel and Stygian, the bog had a textural beauty, its atmosphere, like its fickle microclimate, changing with the wind. Then, the sucking morass of fable crept back into my consciousness each time the fog swept in, smudging the horizon and leaching the color from the ground. I would watch Aivar stop to consult his temperamental GPS, convinced all the while that we were lost, that the mire would swallow us whole, only to regurgitate us in some future century, preserved and leathery in the peat.

But in other moments, when the sun found a gap in the purple clouds, the landscape was transfigured. Each shift in the light coaxed rainbows from the bog pools, transforming the ground underfoot from a rotting cabbage stew to a sumptuous carpet, luxuriant and kaleidoscopic. Dwork, who I always assumed to have a willfully gloomy outlook, would have hated it.

To really appreciate the bog’s recondite wonders, however, you had to pause, look down and zoom in. One square foot of bog contained hidden galaxies. There were ivory fractals of dead lichen, like intricate coral, and miniature hills and valleys of sphagnum moss in every shade. In between, delicate yet deadly, thousands of sundews — tiny, carnivorous plants — sat patiently, holding red tentacles to the sun. At the end of each appendage glinted beads of gluey mucilage, waiting to ensnare an unsuspecting fly. By obtaining their protein from invertebrates, carnivorous plants like these thrive on the bog’s nutrient-poor earth, and their profusion here had the effect of laying the ecosystem elegantly bare — the insects buzzing around my legs feeding the plants, which in their turn fed the earth. Each year, Aivar told me, dying vegetation pushes the Kuresoo’s 20-foot-thick repository of peat skyward by about one millimeter. This was land at its most animated and alive.

But the greatest thing about bogs was, quite simply, the pleasure of discovering somewhere so outside my realm of previous experience. I never tired of the alien feeling of the earth — the moss yielding several inches with each clownish stride, as the surface on either side rose like leavening bread, swelling with the displaced water.

It is all too easy, in this age of image saturation, to fall victim to a creeping ambivalence about the grandiose — those mountains and waterfalls that are supposed to excite our sense of the sublime. The bog, by contrast, reassured me that the natural world would never run dry of mystery. Like the sight of a spider spinning a delicate web or a shark’s sinuosity, it distilled the power of grace that contradicts negative expectations. It was a beauty magnified by the delight of surprise.